PROOF THAT AUSTRALIA'SDepartment of Foreign
Affairs
and Trade (DFAT)deliberately
betrayed East Timor by preventing timely insertion of a United
Nations peacekeeping force which would have protected the people
from Indonesian military reaction to the 1999 independence
referendum.

Confirmed
by this retrospective report in May, 2001

Military
officer reveals Australian responsibility for Timor
massacreA serving Australian military intelligence
officer has revealed that the Howard government
suppressed intelligence reports that could have averted
the massacre of at least 60 people at a police station in
the East Timorese town of Maliana in early September
1999.

[During the massacre by Indonesian forces]. . .troops
were ordered to understate the death toll. As a result,
the official body count registered for Maliana was about
12, whereas an intelligence officer saw evidence of more
than 60 bodies and Australian soldiers were aware that
many more bodies were probably dumped at sea or in
rivers.Go to full report by Mike Head (WSWS)

From the very beginning, the message to Australian
troops in East Timor was clear. The first words
of the first page of their East Timor Handbook spelt it
out. "Our defence relationship with Indonesia is our
most important in the region and a key element in
Australia`s approach to regional defence
engagement." And it was a message further
reinforced during their mission.

CAPTAIN ANDREW PLUNKETT: Halfway through the operation
here in Maliana, around October-November, things had
changed strategically. There was a new Government, a new
Wahid Government and the position was...in the Department
of Foreign Affairs and Trade, was "We don`t want our
long-term relationship with Indonesia affected by a war
crimes tribunal." Dateline report 16 May 2001

The slaughter of East Timor citizens was organised by
the Indonesian Government and financed using
international aid money. --Dateline report, 16 Feb 2000

Further
confirmation, May 2004: Lance Collins, Australia's senior
intelligence officer in the Interfet force, claimed his
career had suffered since July 1998 when he warned that a
"pro-Jakarta lobby" was distorting information
being given to government and that an army officer may
have been spying for a foreign government. See Bulletin
article. Collins said he
was threatened with being driven to suicide,
the same fate which befell senior DIO officer Merv
Jenkins in Washington, also over East Timor intelligence
issues.

See also Peter Cronau's ABC Background Briefing(30 May
2004) in which independent military lawyer Michael
Toohey's report is quoted:

I find as a fact that a pro-Jakarta
lobby exists in DIO [the Defence Intelligence
Organisation] which distorts intelligence estimates
to the extent those estimates are heavily driven by
government policy which overlooks (or attributes the
blame to other factions) atrocities and terrorist
activities committed by TNI [the Indonesian
military]. In other words, DIO reports what the
government wants to hear.

and which quotes Djakarta ambassador Richard
Woolcott's secret 1975 telegram to his DFAT boss
in Canberra:

"Policies should be based on disengaging
ourselves as far as possible from the Timor situation. We
should leave events to take their course; and if and when
Indonesia does intervene, act in a way which would be
designed to minimise the public impact in Australia and
show privately understanding to Indonesia of their
problems. I know I am recommending a pragmatic
rather than a principled stand, but that is what national
interest and foreign policy is all about."

The Department admitted in an August, 1999,
report to a Senate committee that "There is evidence available
to the Australian Government that TNI [the Indonesian
military] has been actively involved in encouraging and
supporting pro-integrationist militias in East Timor,
including through the supply of arms."

And yet, according to a leaked
document, the
head of DFAT, Dr Ashton Calvertargued strongly
against a peacekeeping forceduring talks in
Washington in February with a senior American State
Department official, Stanley Roth. See the Sept 6
report by independent journalist Brian
Toohey, and his follow-up exposť
on 21 Feb, 2000.

.The
Australian Government claimed credit for prompting B
J Habibie to authorise the holding of the fateful
consultation plebiscite. It is now obvious that, in pursuit of
Indonesian trade and strategic interests, the Australian Government also
connived to remove any chance of an armed UN
peacekeeping presence at the time when it was needed
and when it would probably have prevented the
subsequent slaughter. This was reported by
Paul Daley in The Sunday Age, 1st August 1999:

Dr Ashton Calvert

After lengthy, top-level consideration, including
senior Federal Government figures, Australian defence
chiefs and leading diplomats rejected the US offer.

They told the Americans that any discussion of
possible UN peacekeeping involving the Marine Corps was
``premature'' and could be "damaging'' to bilateral
relations between Australia and Indonesia. [emphasis
added]

It is believed this message was also conveyed by the
Secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade,
Dr Ashton Calvert, during a recent meeting in the United
States with the US Assistant Secretary of State for East
Asian and Pacific Affairs, Mr Stanley Roth.

Sources said Dr Calvert and Mr Roth disagreed on the
circumstances under which an international force should
be sent to East Timor.

Mr Roth said it was desirable for peacekeeping -
whether or not it involved US Marines - to take place
sooner rather than later while Dr Calvert took a more
conservative approach. Sources told The Sunday Age that
despite public perceptions to the contrary, the US
appears willing to play a central, if not leading, role
in peace monitoring or ``peace making'' - the separation
of warring parties - in East Timor.

As human rights in the troubled Indonesian province have
become an increasing preoccupation among prominent
congressmen and senators, America has expressed increased
pessimism about the aftermath of the forthcoming vote.

``The US has listened to arguments that it is premature
for the UN to consider troops (for East Timor) before the
vote. But there is a view amongst the influential (in the
US) that after the vote ... (could) be leaving it too
late,'' a diplomatic source explained.

Australia's decision to snub the US military's offer
shows that, despite significant international pressure,
Australia remains fiercely intent on protecting its
bilateral relationship with Indonesia while conducting
its own contingency planning for East Timor peacekeeping.

A leaked copy of a DFAT record of the February
Roth-Calvert discussion reveals there was "one area
of difference" over security in the territory.

"Roth's approach, which he admitted was a personal
view given that he had not yet discussed it with
Secretary [of State, Dr Madeleine] Albright, or other
agencies, was that a full-scale peacekeeping operation
would be an unavoidable aspect of the transition,"
the document states.

"Without it, East Timor was likely to collapse. Roth
saw no prospect for reconciliation between East Timorese
groups which could avert the need for significant
external intervention ...

"Roth suggested that Australia's position of keeping
peace keeping at arms length was essentially defeatist,
and that it was necessary to go forth and persuade
Congress and UN member states that it simply had to be
done."

The DFAT document says that Dr Calvert had argued the
need for the international community to induce the East
Timorese and Indonesian leaders to work towards an
orderly and peaceful transition to independence or
autonomy and to avert the need for peacekeeping.

* * *

More details of the story are
presented by Mike Head in two articles on the World Socialist
website, dated 7 August
and 12 August.

On 16 September, after Indonesian troops,
police and militias had razed East Timor and brutalised its
pro-independence population, and the UN had just approved an
Australian-led pacification force, the following report
appeared in The Canberra Times:

Australia's
Indonesia experts were accused yesterday of being a bunch
of drongos before the Senate committee investigating the
East Timor crisis.

Led by former army chief John
Sanderson*, Paxiquest, a team of peacekeeping
specialists, issued a damning indictment of Department of
Foreign Affairs and Trade staff.

Paxiquest consultant Mark Plunkett said the department
had rejected any notion of Indonesia pursuing a
scorched-earth policy, brushing aside leaked documents as
"hysterical and fake" and indulging in wishful
thinking about the outcome of the independence poll.

"It is a fair
inference, that there has been an almighty cock-up, a
gigantic bungle of some sort or another, because it put
at risk not just the lives of Australians on the United
Nations mission, but all international people," he
said.

"But worse still, the lives of the people who the
international community and our Government encouraged to
go to the polls and vote. And the U.N. said it would not
leave."

Mr Plunket said he was surprised by the depth of
arrogance among DFAT officials.

"When I see the elegant tomfoolery of some of our
representatives then I know, just from their lack of
people skills, they are not trained," he said.

"There are stars like
(Australian ambassador to Indonesia John McCarthy), but
there are a lot of drongos."

In a scathing submission, Paxiquest said the failure of
Australia's public-sector information-gathering and
analysis bodies on the planned genocide was reprehensible
in the extreme and deserving of censure.

"The Australian government
agencies failed to search out and listen to disconfirming
information that would have alerted the Australian
Government and the world community to the genocide,"
the submission said.

"In the weeks preceding, there
was publicly available evidence -- including documents
and authoritative public statements -- predicting the
genocide, but this was discounted by them as false and
hysterical."

A Fitzgerald-style inquiry into those government
agencies was needed to determine the extent of
institutional corruption, the submission said.

* John
Sanderson was later appointed Governor of Western
Australia

The Canberra Times, Thursday September 16 1999.

* * * *

ADDENDA

On 31 January, 2000, the
following imbecilic apologia appeared in a report published
by the Sydney Morning Herald:

Mr Downer also revealed that Australia and the US had
heard reports of "a scorched earth" plan for
after the ballot but the Government made a judgment that
it was not the most likely outcome.

Mr Downer said: "Let us say you have a spectrum
of 0 to 10, 10 just a complete massacre of the
population. What happened was about eight ... our
expectations were around five. That's an on-balance
judgment and it was therefore a little worse that we had
expected."

But he believes that despite this, there was no
failure by the Government or its agencies because there
were contingency plans for all possible outcomes -
including the violence that eventually erupted.

"We were prepared for everything [and] we proved
that. We were even prepared for a worse situation than
actually occurred; what, for example, we would have done
if they started killing people in the United Nations
compound, we had contingency plans for that sort of
thing."

As a result, Mr Downer concluded: "There wasn't a
failure on anybody's part."

On 24 Feb 2000, the following reader's letter appeared
in The Canberra Times

Damn hangnail! Fix broken
arm!

SAYING the Defence
Department needs a shake-up but Foreign Affairs is OK
is like trimming a hangnail when you've got a broken
arm. Foreign Affairs got us into the East Timor mess
by ignoring Defence Department intelligence reports
all last year. Our excellent army went in and saved
the day; too late to save thousands of East Timorese
though (thanks to the Foreign Affairs mandarins). Now
Foreign Affairs wants to hold back radio intercepts
which show hundreds of East Timorese were tied
together with heavy chains and dropped into the sea.
Another cover-up! Damn the hangnail! Fix the broken
arm! We need a full enquiry into the Foreign Affairs
Department.